


& it's hard for me to say

by adhdjess (lesbiankavinsky)



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: F/F, F/M, Trans Character, trans guy jess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-07 01:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8776978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiankavinsky/pseuds/adhdjess
Summary: Jess Mariano owes a lot to books. It’s a debt he’s comfortable with, one that can be paid off in a leisurely fashion and through the whole of his life by reading and by writing and by rescuing abandoned volumes of poetry from puddles and painstakingly resuscitating them with a blowdryer.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This will probably update incredibly slowly, my apologies  
> Title is from the Jesus & Mary Chain song "April Skies"

Jess Mariano owes a lot to books. It’s a debt he’s comfortable with, one that can be paid off in a leisurely fashion and through the whole of his life by reading and by writing and by rescuing abandoned volumes of poetry from puddles and painstakingly resuscitating them with a blowdryer. Books had given him a way out of the interminable boredom of his childhood,  had provided friendship when he had no real friends at home or at school, had led him to his calling. They were also the way he’d figured out he was boy. It’s his first year of high school when he mentions in an offhand way that he generally prefers books with male narrators. A girl comments that “that isn’t very feminist of you” which, in his book, is pretty close to being told “that isn’t very  _ fuck the man _ of you” and he strives to live a  _ fuck the man  _ life. Generally, Jess finds that there isn’t much use prying into his own emotions; they tend to be nebulous bubbles of anger or hurt or delight with no apparent source or way out, so he usually just stews in them. But this bothers him so he spends a solid three days trying to figure it out, and comes out the other end with a fairly simple answer. These books let him be a man while he’s reading and that feels good. There isn’t all that much in the life of 14-year-old Jess that feels good, so when he figures this out, he acts on it. In the following week he cuts his hair brutally short with the clippers his mom keeps for unknown purposes on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet, gets rid of the few skirts he’d owned, and comes out to his mom. It’s a quick turnaround, but it’s so rare for him to actually figure out what’s going on inside his head that once he knows, he doesn’t see much point in waiting around. 

When, a year later, he gets shipped off to Stars Hollow, the one thing he’s grateful for is that no one in this quaint little town knows him, no one misgenders him, no one tells him they wish he’d grow his hair back out. He thinks that maybe, if he plays this right, he won’t have to come out to anyone here. But then Luke takes him to Lorelai’s for dinner and he meets Rory in her perfectly tidy little bedroom and she’s cute and one of the first books that he sees on one of her many bookshelves is  _ Howl  _ and  she says  _ trust me _ and though he’s cursing himself to hell and back for it, he does trust her. He wants to tell her how he spent a month sleeping with his own battered copy of  _ Howl _ under his pillow and how he’s absolutely crawling out of his skin in this town and it’s only his first day and that her hair looks really soft. And he wants to tell her that he’s got an itch under his binder that he can’t get to and that he’s unbearably hot under four layers. Instead, he takes a beer from the fridge and goes outside to get some fresh air and drink in peace and think about Rory. It’s not love at first sight. It’s better than that.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh, hey, I’m not going to confess my undying love for you.” No, he thinks, because you’re too much of a chickenshit for that. “I just wanted to tell you something and I didn’t want anyone overhearing, okay?”

It’s not a test. Walking with Rory later that week he tells himself, _It’s definitely not a test._

It’s a test.

In his pocket he’s got her copy of _Howl_ which he’d swiped (despite her offer to lend it to him) from her bedroom when he’d been there for dinner. He’s been annotating it whenever he gets bored at school, and since he’s always bored at school, his notes fill the margins by the end of the next day. Now he’s running his finger along the book’s spine where it rests in his pocket and telling himself it’s not a test.

When he pulls it from his pocket, she’s all smiles. “You bought a copy? I told you I’d lend you mine.”

“It’s yours,” he says. And this is where the test begins. At first she’s confused, a little irritated. He tells her that he’d made notes as he hands it to her and her face stays blank until she begins to read. From then until the end of the conversation, she’s smiling even when she isn’t smiling. It’s pressed into the corners of her lips, the set of her eyes.  

This is the test: how does she see this? Does she think he wrecked her book or does she realize he’d intended it as a gift, the best kind of gift he could give: here, the one thing he’s good at: talking about poetry neatly packaged.

Rory takes it as a gift. She passes the test. She calls him Dodger and Jess walks home feeling like there’s a piece of gold lodged in his throat, choking him with gladness and light.

~

Jess hasn’t really figured out the whole making friends thing, much less the whole interacting with your crush thing, so he spends the next several weeks antagonizing Rory at every opportunity. Weirdly, it’s sort of working. She doesn’t hate him. All the same, he’s aware that if he’s going to actually become her friend, he needs a plan. And part of that plan is coming out to her. He likes being stealth here, but all the same it would be nice to have someone to talk to about things, someone who knows, and he trusts Rory absolutely. So he formulates a plan which involves getting Rory alone and foisting his copies of Susan Stryker and Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman on her and running away. There are approximately two conversations he’s comfortable having and this is definitively not one of them.

In a marvelous stroke of luck, an opportunity falls into his lap to simultaneously get Rory alone and royally piss off her boyfriend. In good quaint little town fashion, they’re raffling off picnic baskets made by the local women and while Jess can’t even begin to express the number of things wrong with that, he happily outbids Dean and goes with Rory on the most expensive not-date imaginable. Ninety bucks for a basket of inedible food and an hour alone on the bridge with her. It’s more than worth it.

Together they sit with their feet dangling just above the water, and Rory says, “Why are you only nice to me?”

The question takes him by surprise, not because he doesn’t know the answer but because it seems so _obvious_. She’s smart and sweet and owns every book he’s ever really loved and she has to know, she has to know how trustworthy she seems to people. It’s something she radiates, intangible and impossible to measure, that makes everyone in this town adore her. Including all of the people he hates. But he doesn’t say any of that. As he gives his flippant reply, he realizes he hasn’t said anything honest to her since they got here. He’s tired of this.

“So it was a plan.” Rory says.

Jess looks up, his heart suddenly uncomfortable in his chest. “What?”

“The whole bidding on my basket thing. It was a plan.”

_Yes. Yes it was a plan because I have to talk to you and it’s important and I had to come here to my favorite place in this hell town to say or it I’d never manage to put the words together._

“Okay, I’m officially starving,” he says.

"And officially evasive.”      

"You wanna get a pizza?”

"Jess-”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it was a plan. But not like you think, not to crash your date with Dean.” He scrubs at the side of his jaw with his jacket sleeve. “I wanted to talk to you. Alone.”

Rory gets an _oh boy_ look on her face and he realizes he’s already fucking this up.

“Oh, hey, I’m not going to confess my undying love for you.” _No_ , he thinks, _because you’re too much of a chickenshit for that._ “I just wanted to tell you something and I didn’t want anyone overhearing, okay?”

Rory scrunches her lips up and then nods. “Shoot.”

And so he tells her. Haltingly and at times painfully, but he tells her. Once he hands her the books, she doesn’t look much at him, just scans the back covers and nods once in a while. She never interrupts him. In the end he does flee as soon as possible, stuffing his hands deep in his pockets and moving away down the bridge in long strides, trying to work some of the nervous energy out of his body. It will be fine, he tells himself. It’s Rory, and he can trust her.

All the same, he doesn’t sleep that night.

~

The next time he sees her is at Luke’s. She’s wearing her Chilton uniform and carrying her backpack.

“Hey,” she says as she slides onto one of the counter seats.

“Hey,” he says.

“I brought back your books.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I hope you don’t mind, I put some notes in the margins. Like you did for me, with _Howl_.”

Jess smiles. “I don’t mind. I’m not prissy about my books.”

She gives him a look and says, “Neither am I.”

That night he reads all her notes, written in tight, neat handwriting in the margins. Most of them are questions, and he starts to make a list of them so he can give her answers. It is, he tells himself, just another way to talk to her. But he knows he would have wanted to tell her even if he wasn’t constantly looking for excuses to talk to her. He wants someone, at long last, to talk to.       

The resulting document is five pages long, with each of her questions copied out and followed by an answer. Next to her writing, his is wild and messy and irregular, which feels entirely appropriate. And there’s something appropriate, too, about the fact that most of their interaction is happening on paper. The two of them, in print. It’s probably the most authentic versions of themselves they have to offer. Maybe the best way for them to be together is after the ink has dried. He still wants to kiss her, though.

The next morning, he slips the letter, folded up and stuffed in an envelope with Rory’s name on it, into his back pocket. Downstairs, Rory and Dean are sitting together at table by the window and he drops the letter in front of Rory without comment as he refills her coffee. Not especially smooth, he realizes, but mostly he had just thought it would be the fastest, least awkward way to get it to her. He hadn’t meant to start anything with Dean, but as he passes their table again, he hears a snippet of conversation.

"It’s not a big deal, Dean, it’s just–”

“If it’s not a big deal then why won’t you tell me about it?”

“It’s private.”

Jess stops, standing strategically with his back turned just far enough that he can hear them without looking as though he’s eavesdropping.

“What private thing could you possibly have to discuss with _him?”_

 _"_ Look, Dean, I’m really really sorry. But I can’t tell you, it would be so, so wrong of me. And if I could tell you, you’d agree that it’s not the kind of thing you can tell people without permission.”

"Let me see that.”

"No. Dean, _no!”_

Fear bubbling in his throat, Jess spins around to see Dean trying to pull the letter from Rory’s hands. In two strides he’s back at their table, leaning over Dean. This is probably the only chance he’ll ever get to tower over the guy, and he’s going to enjoy it.

"Hey,” he says. “Leave her alone or get out.”

"Fine,” Dean says, getting up so abruptly that he almost knocks his chair over and slamming the door behind him.

Jess whistles. “Damn, Gilmore, your boyfriend is dramatic.”

"Shut up,” Rory says miserably. “You shouldn’t have given me the letter like that.”

Jess folds his arms across his chest. “So this is my fault.”

"No, I just–”

"He shouldn’t get jealous like that. I mean, it’s ridiculous. You’re not allowed to have a private conversation with any guy other than him?”

"I mean, it doesn’t help that it’s you.”

Jess drops into the newly empty seat across from her. “What reason have you ever given him to think you’re cheating on him? Or that you even have feelings for someone else. All we’ve ever done is have a few conversations. So what, you’re not allowed to be friends with any guys? If you were bisexual, would he let you have any friends at all?”

"If I were bisexual, I think he’d lose it.” She looks at him. “Oh god, what if I _am_ bisexual.”

Jess raises an eyebrow. “Well, you can figure that out later, but I’d say no matter what, if he would be pissed at you for your sexuality you should probably dump him.”

He knows if he says anything more than that, he’ll get himself into trouble, so he leaves the table and goes back to the counter to scrub it down.

~

A few weeks later, he turns up at her house with an absurd amount of food. “Luke wanted me to make sure you don’t starve.”

He says it with every intention of weaseling his way into a dinner invitation, and it works. Even with Paris there, he’s brought more food than they could possibly eat.

"So,” he says, when he and Rory are setting up the table and Paris is in the bathroom. “This is the famous Paris?”

"Yep,” Rory says. “In the flesh.”

She’s told him a bit about her, snippets here and there, and the tone of exasperation she uses when talking about the girl has always made Jess picture her as a snub-nosed princess in a Chilton uniform.

But Paris isn’t quite like that. He can’t say that he likes her, but she’s more interesting than he’d expected. This impression is only confirmed by the argument they have over their mountain of takeout about Jane Austen and Beat poetry. Really, he thinks, how many people can you have _that_ conversation with? Each time he glances at Rory, she’s grinning like she’s brought about some great convention of literary minds. Which is endearing. When she registers Paris’ surprise that he’s read Jane Austen, she gives him a quick glance and smile that makes him feel like they’re in on a secret together. Of _course_ he’s read Jane Austen. He’s about to launch into a speech about why Jane Austen is really the best of nineteenth century English because in her own dry, humorous way, she’s rebelling against essentially all the major values of the society she’s living in. And really, there’s nothing more punk than that. But then the doorbell rings and it’s Dean and there’s a fight and his stomach goes sour and he can’t wait to get out of there. Still, he thinks as he makes his quiet way home, he’s surprised by Paris. If he could live with people like that, people who will fight with him about books and eat absurd amounts of junk food, he might not be so pissed off all the time.

~

Jess is starting to think that Luke is intent on screwing with his head. He’s set up a tutoring session for Jess with Rory, which is screwing with his head on several levels. First of all, Luke’s general message in regards to Rory has always been something along the lines of _stay the fuck away from her_. But now he’s pushing them together. Second, he’s combining Jess’ least favorite thing (school) with his favorite thing (Rory), possibly as some kind of reverse aversion therapy.

Whatever Luke’s motives, Rory is now at a table in the diner looking through a stack of his textbooks as he unsuccessfully tries to distract her with magic tricks. She seems genuinely puzzled by his inability to focus or remember any of the details she’s repeating to him over and over again, which makes him sort of happy because it means she hasn’t just dismissed him as hopeless and kind of irritating. But it also means that she has on no level grasped that it’s just the way he’s built. He’s never going to be able to sit down and memorize a list of facts he isn’t interested in. He’s never going to be able to manufacture excitement about whatever era of history Rory is trying to tell him about – the Marshall Plan? World War I? He doesn’t remember. Whatever it is, he’s thinking about something else. That’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it’ll always be. It’s not so bad, really. If he’s interested in a book, he can read it in an hour or two. If he isn’t, he’ll never get through it. In a way, it’s just his brain forcing him to be the kind of person he wants to be anyway. But Rory doesn’t get that. Not yet, at least.

"Do you wanna go get some ice cream?”

By the look on her face, he guesses he’s interrupted her, though he hadn’t meant to.

“Jess –”

“How about this, we go grab ice cream and then I do all my homework.”

She looks skeptical at first, but he’s done the smart thing and catered to her sweet tooth.

A few minutes later they’re in his car, the books abandoned at the diner, driving to the local ice cream place and talking about why good lyrics are different than good poetry and this, this for Jess is heaven. And the thing is, he’s pretty sure it makes Rory happy, too. Sure, she’ll be happier once she’s got an ice cream cone but this – this makes her happy. Which is why he’s so entirely confused by her and Dean. Aside from his raging jealousy issues he seems like an okay guy, but he doesn’t want to talk to her about poetry. He’s trying hard to keep himself, even in the depths of his mind, from making the kind of declarative statements that bother him so much coming from other guys. _I deserve her. We just belong with each other. I’m better than him_. Still, he’s long past the point where he can pretend the magnetism doesn’t go both ways.

Somehow they get onto the topic of classical music and Rory is still registering her shock at his opinion as they park outside the ice cream place. Closing her door, Rory stares at him over the roof of the car. “You _like_ Mozart?”

Jess shrugs. “I mean, not all of Mozart. Some of his stuff is unbelievably boring.”

Rory comes around and together they go inside. She’s still staring at him with this expression of awe and he wants to keep that look on her face as long as he possibly can, and somehow this desire provokes in him a simultaneous urge to give her a shit-eating grin and tell her he’s just kidding and to give her a thorough analysis of _The Marriage of Figaro_ to prove his point about Mozart being a total rebel. Instead, he says, “Look, the guy was a little shit. Spent his time antagonizing his patrons, messing with the ruling powers and making music. You gotta see some affinity there.”

"Alright,” she says, still giving him that look. “I guess.”

They order – butter pecan for him and triple fudge brownie for her, which she eats at an alarming rate. Back in the car, as Jess attempts to eat his ice cream while also driving, Rory asks the inevitable question. He’s heard it from pretty much everyone of any significance in his life, and it always goes something like this: how can you be so damn smart and not use it? The thing is, he rejects the premise of the question. He’s not sure he’s so damn smart to start with – after all, what does that even mean? He always had, a voracious appetite for books. He gets obsessed with things and he learns everything he can about them. Half the time, he forgets it all again the next day. Other things he remembers with remarkable precision, though he doesn’t know why. Certainly not by effort. He can’t make himself focus. He can’t make himself care. Basically, he can’t make himself be any way other than he is. It’s not laziness, it’s just him. And besides that, he takes objection to this idea that he’s not using his brain. He’s using it to read, he’s using it to write. If he ends up selling hot dogs, it’ll be because people don’t find any value in the things he’s doing, not because he’s not doing anything. And he suspects that’s the way it is for most of the hot dog vendors of the world.

But he doesn’t say that to Rory, because he doesn’t say that to anyone. Instead, he gets her to drive the car from the passenger seat while he eats his ice cream and she berates him for his total disregard for the rules of the road. Which is sweet.

And maybe he wouldn’t feel so bad about the crash if that’s how it had happened – if he’d been doing something dumb to get a rise out of her and he could look at it and say _yes, I screwed it up with my oh so typical failure to follow the rules_. Part of it, also, is the fact that he really wishes, stupid as it may be, that he hadn’t had the wheel in his hands at the moment of impact.

In the waiting room he’s pacing back and forth, rubbing his palms against his jeans to try to get rid of the sweat. He’d almost had to fight off an orderly who was trying to convince him that they needed to do a full check-up on him to make sure he wasn’t injured – fat chance of that, he’s not dealing with transphobic shit from nurses and doctors and x-ray operators tonight, he’d rather die of internal bleeding. But Rory _is_ hurt and he really is going to fight an orderly if they don’t tell him she’s okay soon.

Finally someone comes and tells him it’s just a fractured wrist and relief blossoms in his chest for just a moment before he knows he’s gonna leave town. He can’t face Luke and the town and Lorelai – he doesn’t even think he can face Rory. He’s known all along that there would come a time for him to go home to Liz, no matter how much it would suck. He’s known all along, and maybe that’s why he hasn’t committed, not in a real way, to this thing with Rory. Because he’s always known that at the end of the day, he’ll bail.

~

He expects returning to the city to be a relief, and in some ways it is. Part of what made living in Stars Hollow so hellish for him is the pace of it, the interminable length of the days in which nearly nothing happened. There’s always a million things happening in the city, always sound and bustle and a certain element of chaos entirely lacking from the little Connecticut town. All the same, he misses Rory as soon as he gets off the bus. He misses Rory more than he would if they dropped him off on a deserted island with no books. He misses her particularly because he wants to show her everything. Every piece of graffiti, every failing corner bookstore, every spot where the light comes down the street a certain way, he wants to show her. Somehow, as different as they are, there’s some essential similarity in the way they look at things. She makes him feel so much less alone.

Still, he resists the urge to call or write (though he addresses some of the notes in the margins of the novel he’s reading to her) because as much as he wants Rory walking next to him in New York, he still doesn’t feel ready for actual Rory in Stars Hollow with a fractured wrist.

In the end, he gets a little of both. He isn’t even surprised when she turns up at his park bench in Central Park with a cast on her wrist. She’s even a Chilton uniform, which makes him laugh because she looks so deeply, utterly out of place here. Probably about how he looked in Stars Hollow.

"Hey,” he says.

And she says, “Hey.”

And just like that, they’re okay with one another. Maybe not good, maybe not perfect, but okay. Which is a place to start.

For Jess, that day together in New York is like a prayer delivered. He gets to show her around, buy her some shitty street food, teach her about the subway system. He gets to go with her to a record store, which is more than he ever really dreamed of.

He glances at her as she’s sorting through records, talking absently to him and herself, and he makes a conscious effort to capture the moment in his mind, to take a snapshot not just of how she looks right now, but of the sound of her voice, the smell of the shop, how he feels right now. Later – that inevitable later when he feels like shit and can’t remember a single thing worth living for – he’s going to need the memory of it. This day with her has been like that ride from the diner to the ice cream place when everything between them had just felt so right, and somehow like old habit, like they’ve known each other (like they’ve loved each other) for years.

He walks her back to the bus station and teases her for giving bad directions to a tourist. She, of course, wants to run after the man and tell him her mistake, which is so perfectly Rory – but she has a bus to catch. Standing below her window, he looks up at her – like a mock _Romeo and Juliet,_ he thinks for an instant. Then, before he loses his chance and his nerve, he asks her. “Why’d you come? I mean, skipping school, that’s not like you.”

For a moment he thinks she’ll make a joke about how he’s corrupted her and now she skips school all the time, but she doesn’t. She just looks at him, and says, “Because you didn’t say goodbye.”

"Oh,” he says. He sits with it for a minute. “Goodbye, Rory.”

"Goodbye, Jess.”

And he watches her ride away and doesn’t say that he left without saying goodbye because he’d figured saying goodbye to her would break his heart, and he’d been right.

~

He comes back to Stars Hollow. Of course he does. There’s plenty that he doesn’t get about himself, plenty he can’t or won’t unravel, but he knows, most of the time, what makes him happy. For whatever reason, he feels compelled much of the time to wreck what makes him happy, but he knows it all the same. So he goes to Stars Hollow, and he goes down to the Independence Inn, because that’s where she is.

He’s standing on the sloping bank of the river (really, he thinks, the land around Lorelai’s inn is gorgeous, he’d never realized) when he sees Rory. She’s wearing a blue dress of some kind of satiny material and she looks beautiful because of course she does and he wants to say to her, _you’re going to make me fall apart._ Then she sees him and she marches up to him and he’s pretty much expecting her to slap him – not entirely undeserved, he will admit. But then she grabs his jacket and pulls him in to kiss him.

All the metaphors fall flat. Like water in the desert, like air to a drowning man, like a light in the dark. So what is it like, being kissed by Rory Gilmore? Maybe this is the real sign that he’s meant to be a poet, because even now, in this moment, he’s looking for a metaphor. Like the first drag of a cigarette. Like falling asleep when you’ve been up for days. Like communion wine. And it’s the last one that ends up feeling most true because it’s short and it’s sweet and it leaves him lightheaded and yes, yes, there’s something holy in it even to an unbeliever.

And then she’s turning on her heel and walking away from him and yes, she’s definitely going to make him fall apart. He raises his hand to his lips and presses his fingers against them. Yes, still real, still alive. Still part of him, though now sanctified. Maybe here, at last, is someone worth being good for.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to toomanyfeelings5 on tumblr for proofing!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He goes up to the apartment where Luke is already sleeping and puts his headphones on to listen to his walkman. It’s Velvet Underground, Venus in Furs. Every time the song ends he hits the rewind put and listens to it again, five minutes of hypnotic glory and a rhythm he can tap out against his sternum after he wrestles his way out of his binder and lies down on the ground, staring at the ceiling. And right now he’s grateful for his obsessive mind because even within an hour of deciding he needs to make his life about something other than Rory, he can tell this song is the only thing he’s going to think about for the next week. _I am tired, I am weary. I could sleep for a thousand years._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize that I'm stretching the bounds of realism in terms of logistics for Jess getting top surgery here, but bear with me, I'm all about writing happy trans kids who can do what they want to in terms of their transitions. 
> 
> My timeline is starting to diverge significantly from canon and will continue to do so, some canon scenes will continue to crop up, but the further I go in this fic the less canon-compliant it'll be.

Of course, it all goes to shit. Because Rory is still dating Dean and she doesn’t say anything to Jess before she leaves for the summer, which means he spends three months stewing. Every time he tries to sort it out, the whole thing gets more tangled than ever. Theoretically, if she kisses him that means she loves him. But if she loves him, why is she still dating Dean? Can she love both of them at once? Can she love him, but not enough to break up with Dean? Maybe it’s strange, but the idea of her loving someone else as well doesn’t bother him. It’s just that she’s dating someone who would be a long way from okay with her loving someone else. He thinks about it and he stews and he has no idea what any of it means. He doesn’t know what she feels, and he doesn’t know what he feels, either.

So he goes on walks. In the Stars Hollow summer, he walks around in long pants and enough layers that he’s too hot even in air conditioning and he tries not to think. He sees guys jogging shirtless and tries not to strangle them in a fit of jealousy. He tries to sweat it all out. In the process, he gets to know the town. He tries not to think, _Man, I came back to this shit town for her and now – and now_. But he can’t make himself love the place, no matter how hard he tries. He wants to for her, and maybe it would be easier if he was feeling a little less complicated about her at the moment.

Luke pokes at him about it, but he’s not going to tell.

“You’re in a mood,” Luke says Jess wipes down the counter.   

Jess looks up at him, one eyebrow raised. “I’m always in a mood. How is this new to you.”

“You miss Rory.”

“You miss Lorelai. Every time she leaves the diner.”

Luke gives him a look, like, _low blow,_ but Jess doesn’t respond because the thing about Rory was a low blow too, and Luke knows it.

“She’ll be back.”

“Who says I want her to get back?”

Luke blows it off like Jess doesn’t mean it, and Jess can almost forgive him for the whole thing because he doesn’t’ know what’s going on between them, doesn’t know what’s happened. He can almost forgive him.

He takes to spending early mornings up on the roof of the diner. He has to scramble up onto it from the second story window, and he almost falls a couple times, but he doesn’t mind that so much. He’s not scared of falling. Luke doesn’t know – he’s always downstairs doing prep before the sun is up, and he assumes that Jess is sleeping in. But he never is, not these days. Up on the roof he reads and watches the people coming out, the street starting to fill up, and even if he can’t love the place, he tries to chip away at his hate for it. All the poets are telling him to do that. Not to hate a place or a person, but to move with grace through the world. Fat chance. Here he is, a kid full of the kind of anger that makes him want to beat his head against a window till enough of his brain cells are dead that he can’t feel it anymore. Here he is, in a quaint Connecticut town. There’s nothing graceful about him. The hate is still there, weighty in his stomach. Useless.

~ 

The day Rory comes home, he hears about it from half the town while filling coffees at the dinner. He doesn’t break any dishes, which he thinks is pretty impressive, but no one congratulates him on it. He calls the girl he’s been sporadically making out with in Rory’s absence and meets up with her in the town square. It’s a bit staged, sure, but he wants to make sure she sees him. He wants to piss her off as much as he possibly can without talking to her. He sees Rory and Lorelai talking to Taylor, and though he doesn’t actually manage to make eye contact with Rory, Jess is certain she’s spotted him by the pinched, angry look on her face. It doesn’t feel as good as it should. And it feels worse than it should when he sees her with Dean, the two of them as picture-perfect a couple as ever. That spring, when she’d kissed him she’d told him, “Don’t tell anyone.” And at first it hadn’t bothered him because he’d assumed, fool that he was, that she needed to figure things out with Dean before they could be together. Now it feels like what she was really saying was _this is all wrong, you’re all wrong, I’m the smart, pretty girl who ends up with the kind, handsome boy, and you’re no part of that._ And it’s true, he isn’t. He has no intention of ever living the life Dean’s going to live. Only for the space of a few hours, he’d really believed she was going to be part of something with him. It had been harder to lose that belief than it had been to think she didn’t care about him at all.

A few days later, he runs into her at Doose’s and she’s obviously pissed at him and he’s oddly grateful because it means he can vent some of his own anger. For once in his life, he’s pretty sure he’s in the right here. And the thing is, she’s avoiding the subject -- almost any subject, until she actually says she was surprised to see him with a girl after what had happened between them, at which point he realizes just how self-righteous she’s feeling.

As a general rule, he hates hurting Rory. He hates that he’s done it over and over again, accidentally, from clumsiness or lack of care but at this point he’s baring his teeth with every intention of showing her he can bite, and to let her know that she shouldn’t be surprised if he does.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Did I hear from you at all this summer? Did I just happen to miss the thousands of phone calls you made to me, or did the postman happen to lose all those letters you wrote to me?”

Rory’s face is going blank but he hears himself, and he hears more hurt than anger in his voice and he can’t help thinking, _I’m bleeding_ . Like when he used to play absentmindedly with his pocketknife with the blade out, so lost in thought that he didn’t notice that he was cutting his own hands until he looked down at them. _I’m bleeding_. He gets angrier. “You kiss me-”

And this, of course, is dangerous territory, but he presses on anyway.

“-you tell me not to say anything -- very flattering, by the way. Then you go off to Washington. Then nothing.” He keeps going, letting himself get angrier, watching her get angry back, until he asks, for the second time, “Are you still with Dean?”

She just looks at him.

“Come on, Rory, yes or no. Are you still with Dean?”

“Yes. I’m still with Dean, yes.” There’s a glint in her eye, stubborn and furious.

So he lets it go. Walking out of Doose’s, he decides it’s time -- beyond time, to make his life about something other than Rory Gilmore. The only trouble is that this is Stars Hollow, and as far as he can tell, she’s the only good thing here. But there are the things he can take anywhere, like his music and his books. He goes up to the apartment where Luke is already sleeping and puts his headphones on to listen to his walkman. It’s Velvet Underground, [Venus in Furs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLQzaLr1enE). Every time the song ends he hits the rewind put and listens to it again, five minutes of hypnotic glory and a rhythm he can tap out against his sternum after he wrestles his way out of his binder and lies down on the ground, staring at the ceiling. And right now he’s grateful for his obsessive mind because even within an hour of deciding he needs to make his life about something other than Rory, he can tell this song is the only thing he’s going to think about for the next week. _I am tired, I am weary. I could sleep for a thousand years._

~

He starts skipping school. A stupid thing to do, maybe, but he can’t make it through his classes without wanting to bang his head against the desk and he knows himself well enough to know that eventually he’ll start doing it and people will be confused and angry and there will be blood on the desk and a concussion and really, no one wants that. This means more free time on his hands, and, hoping to escape the dull depression that predominated the summer, he starts looking for a job. He starts working at Walmart, picking up more and more shifts because there’s something he likes about this dull work, about how as he goes through the motions his mind becomes a winding line of tape playing _shiny shiny shiny boots of leather._

And at some point, as he saves up more and more money, he gets an idea. It requires a lot of research, phone calls to a surgeon in Massachusetts and day trips back to New York to talk to Liz and get her to sign paperwork, visits to the one doctor in the city who he trusts to sign even more paperwork, and doing the math over and over again. The price of the train ride, the price of the surgery, the price of some place to stay while he recovers, before he’s allowed to fly back. How many dollars an hour at Walmart? How many hours per week? How many weeks until he can put his name down on the list? And maybe it’s because he goes to sleep every night with his mind full of numbers and _Venus in Furs_ that he starts picking up more and more shifts, until he’s actually working overtime and not going to any school at all. But it feels worth it, because by October he can tell the surgeon in Massachusetts that he’ll be able to pay for top surgery by December, and he puts the date in the little calendar at the front of the notebook he keeps in his pocket. December 17th, 17th, 17th. Now it’s the only number in his head, and he’s okay with that.

He sees Rory around town sometimes, and sometimes they knock each other’s shoulders. He’s still furious with her, despite trying to let it go. At least she’s not all he thinks about anymore. Rory and Lorelai and Dean have nothing but nasty looks for him, and he occasionally hears Lorelai making comments to Luke about how much trouble he is. It makes him like Luke a little better that he usually tells her to piss off. Most of the time, though, he doesn’t hear, because he keeps his headphones on, hitting rewind, rewind, rewind.

~

The next time Jess really talks to Rory is late September when she quite literally runs into him on the sidewalk, which is maybe a little his fault because he’s reading as he walks, like he usually does. He has to laugh a little because she’s in her Chilton uniform and soaked from head to foot, looking a little desperate. She runs right past him and he has to jog to catch up to her, catching her elbow. He keeps up with her despite her sniping at him because she’s quite obviously in need of help of some sort or another, even if she won’t say so.

Finally she tells him that she needs to shut off the sprinklers in a neighbour’s lawn so he takes off back the way she was coming from because this is something he can do for her and even if she’s still angry, he’s ready for them to be over this. He tries not to think too hard about the conversation he’d had with Luke a few days ago. Luke had been trying to get him to talk about the girl Jess is not-dating, and to get him to admit that what he really wanted was to be with Rory. And Jess had pretty much told him he wasn’t going to wait around for Rory the way Luke had been waiting for Lorelai. Somewhere in the course of that he’d said something about how Luke was constantly doing things for Lorelai, shoveling the snow from her driveway or fixing her porch or clearing out her rain gutters. And here he is now, going to fix some sprinklers for Rory. But he knows this is different, knows this is about mending bridges and not about pining.

“You made it look so easy,” she says plaintively when he shuts the sprinkler off without any trouble.

He shrugs, stuffs his hands in his pockets, tries not to make this more than it is. “It was loose,” he says. “Just had to push down and give it a good twist, that’s all.” He’d had to run through the water to shut it off so his clothes and hair are dripping now as well. It makes him self-conscious but Rory is smiling at him. Worth it, all the same.

“Well, thank you,” she says, not quite looking at him.

“You’re welcome.” He tries not to make it more than it is, but he misses her, her voice, her smile, her stupid uniform. Regardless of romantic feelings, she’s the closest thing that he has to a friend in this town and he misses her. “So,” he says, “things are good?”

“Oh yeah, really good.”

“School?”

“Good.”

“Still gonna do the Harvard thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” he says, and he means it. As much as he would burn the place down if he were anywhere like Harvard, he knows what it means to Rory, knows she’ll be happy there, that she’ll excel. It’s what she’s built to do. He’s never really been allowed to do what he’s built for, and he wouldn’t want to deny her the opportunity. He smiles, and he hopes she understands that it’s a smile of friendship and not of malice.

Rory’s pager goes off and she explains that she’d been trying to call Dean over earlier to help, and that he’s coming now. So Jess says, “Okay,” and turns the sprinklers back on. He walks away, hands in his pockets, and thinks maybe he’d have a few more friends if he could be like that all the time, straightforwardly kind instead of giving into any of his million destructive instincts.

~

He doesn’t manage to keep it up for long. He never does, a fact which never fails to depress him. It’s like falling off the wagon every day of his life. In this case, he doesn’t think he would have done the shitty thing if it hadn’t been for the incident with the lawn sprinklers. But enough with excuses: this is the shitty thing. Jess shows up at the dance-a-thon (which is apparently an annual thing in Stars Hollow, which Jess adds to his mental list of proof that this town is actually a time capsule stuck in a different century) with his not-girlfriend, Shane, and if he’s being honest with himself, he does it entirely to get under Rory’s skin. Not nice. He knows that, but he’s also lonely as hell and looking for someone to take it out on.

The two of them sit in the bleachers and he watches Rory and Shane fidgets. She knows he’s into Rory and he knows she’s not into him and really it all works out alright. It’s not like she had anywhere she wanted to be tonight.

Rory looks unfairly beautiful. She’s dolled up 1940s style with her hair pinned up and pearls in her ears, wearing a pink dress with little white polka-dots. Not at all his style, which only makes him more pissed off that he can’t stop staring at her. At some point Dean shows up and sits behind him in the bleachers, and then it’s Dean watching Jess watching Rory, and occasionally Rory staring back at Jess. When she does that, he tugs Shane over and starts to make out with her. Which, yes, he’s perfectly aware of how detrimental that is toward any chance of him ever getting together with Rory, but at this point he can’t really get himself to care. She’s chosen Dean over and over again, and there’s no reason to think that’ll change, regardless of what Jess does.

He goes out to the little building out back where Lane is handing out sandwiches during the break, mostly because he expects to run into Rory there, and tonight he really can’t seem to leave well enough alone. He asks Lane why Dean isn’t dancing with Rory. “Trouble in paradise?”

“No,” she says. “Nothing’s wrong with her and Dean.”

On an existential level, he feels pretty strongly that there’s a thousand things wrong with her and Dean, but he lets that go for right now.

The pair of them come in as he’s eyeing his sandwich, wondering if he dares to take a bite out of it and of course they get into a spat. When Shane shows up, he puts an arm around her while still staring at Rory, and Rory nestles close to Dean, which seems to piss him off for a reason he can’t place. After they leave, Jess goes to get a soda from the vending machine around back, mostly to get away from the people and the noise. It’s dark, which is nice, and as he digs around in his pockets for a dollar bill he thinks back to Dean’s annoyance. It occurs to him then that Dean was pissed because Rory was only being affectionate to him to get back at Jess for being affectionate with Shane. Which -- was that really the reason? He tries and he tries and he tries not to be hopeful.

Standing in the faint glow of the vending machine and drinking his soda, he puts Rory out of his mind, focusing instead on the way the bubbles burst inside his mouth. He’s always liked that. There, in the cool and the dark, the closes his eyes and feels momentarily at peace, but he misses her, he misses her, he misses her.

Back inside, Shane has fallen asleep on the bleacher so he picks up his book and reads because he’s tired of watching Rory. At some point she wakes up and they make out which, yes, is boring, but at least it gets a rise out of Rory, and they end up arguing again until Jess says, “Just ignore me and pay attention to your boyfriend.”

And Dean says, “Sorry, she can’t. I’m not her boyfriend anymore.”

Jess sits forward. This is interesting.

Rory looks stunned. Now that Jess thinks about it, maybe she shouldn’t be. “What?”

“You know, I tried to ignore this. I really did. But I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.” He’s starting to yell at her, and while Jess isn’t going to lie and say he didn’t want them to break up, he’s starting to feel just a little bad because he didn’t want it to be like this, Dean dumping her in public.

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t wanna be with me, Rory.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh, please. You’ve been into him since he got into town. And I spent weeks, months actually,  trying to convince myself that it wasn’t true, that everything was fine between us. But now I know that I was an idiot. You’re into him, and he’s into you.”

Dean keeps going, but Jess doesn’t hear it. His ears are full of the sound of his own blood and all he can do is take shallow breaths and watch Rory. Dean walks out and for a moment Rory just stands there, looking zoned out. When she leaves, he doesn’t follow her right away. He doesn’t have to. He knows where she’s going. And sure enough, she’s sitting on the bridge, just where the two of them had eaten their picnic that day with the basket.

She looks up at him, then back down into the water.

“Dean’s a jerk,” he says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Yelling at you like that, breaking up with you in front of everybody -- guy’s a total jerk.”

“No,” Rory says. “He’s not. He was right. Everything he said. All those things about you and me, all those things about-” She takes a deep breath, then goes on. “Me lying to him, and messing with his head. He was right.” She looks up at him, and when he doesn’t say anything, she asks, “Well, wasn’t he?”

Jess still doesn’t say anything because he’s still processing this, still taking in the fact that in spite of everything she’s done, it’s him she wants. It’s him, it’s him, it’s been him for a while now and he’s been too pissed off to see that.

But he’s gone quiet for too long and she’s angry now. “Fine,” she says. “He was right about me, then. Now go away.”

But he doesn’t go away, because he has something to say and for once he’s going to say it. He can make the words come out, it’ll just take a few moments. “He was right,” he says. “About.” He stops again and breathes, then says, “All of it.”

Jess looks at Rory, and she looks at him, and they’re finally on the same page. Then she looks back down into the water and says, “We can’t do anything about it, though.”

He lets the air out of his lungs slowly, slowly.

She reaches up to take the pins out of her hair, shaking it loose. He wants to touch it, and stuffs his hands deeper in his pockets. “Because you know what, I’m still pissed at you.” She looks up at him and he sees now that there are tears in her eyes. “I wasn’t good. I know that, I wasn’t good. It was bad, what I did, the way I acted.”

He can tell from her voice, from the way her words come out, that this is difficult for her to say, so he listens.

“But honestly? You didn’t help. I mean, ever since you got here, you’ve been trying to drive a wedge between us. Like a little boy trying to get his crush to pay attention to him by pulling on her pigtails. And you’re better than that. On your best days, at least. You know, my mom told me I shouldn’t date a guy, no matter how much I like him, if he isn’t good.”

“And you wouldn’t ever wanna do something Lorelai told you not to do,” he snaps.

Rory gets up and brushes off her coat, then looks at him, her eyes tired and serious. “No, I wouldn’t. You might not be able to see it, but sometimes she’s a lot smarter than me. Anyway. Maybe we can talk if you start having more good days.”

She brushes past him and walks away and he stands there, hands still stuffed in his pockets, sure he couldn’t say anything back to her now even if he wanted to. He closes his eyes and counts his breaths like he taught himself to when he was little and then he sits down on the bridge and, easing off his shoes, dips his toes in the water. It’s late October so the water is cold, but he’s glad of it, glad of the shock to his system. The trouble is, once he’s had enough time to calm down a bit, he knows that Rory is right. He doesn’t like Dean, but he’s been unfair to him. He never would have picked on the guy -- or at least not nearly as much -- if he hadn’t been dating Rory. He’s been petty and mean and possessive of someone he has absolutely no claim over. Lifting his foot out of the water, he lets a drop fall back into the lake and watches the concentric circles of ripples radiate out. If he keeps his eyes on the little waves, he won’t get overwhelmed, won’t stop breathing, won’t let the wall of guilt crash down on him. Because he’s learned this from a lifetime with his mother: guilt is useless. Liz has always felt bad about the kind of childhood he had, but she’d never done anything to change it, not really. She would just try to make herself feel better with little meaningless gestures that didn’t help anything. She’d buy him candy or cook his favorite meal or brush his hair -- he remembers the hair mostly because she was never any good at it, and would tug at the tangles until there were tears in his eyes. He’d had more than one reason to be happy when he cut it short. In the end her guilt had been suffocating for him. He ended up feeling bad because she felt bad, and now they can’t talk to each other. He won’t be like that. He won’t overwhelm Rory with apologies. He’ll just -- be different. He’ll be better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @nbreid and @toomanyfeelings5 on tumblr for proofing!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke nods, and Jess is about to walk away when Luke catches him by the shoulder and pulls him into a hug. Quietly, so only Jess can hear, Luke says, “I’m proud of you, kid. As long as you didn’t steal the money for all this.”

He gets better. It’s not really as simple as it sounds. It involves biting his tongue enough that he draws blood at one point. But mostly it’s about finding ways to be patient, and not doing the first thing he wants to do. To not say what he wants to say, to hold back when he wants to hit. He teaches himself little tricks, like he taught himself to breathe when he was little. Whenever he got panicked or overwhelmed, he would count his breaths, thinking about the shapes of the numbers and the sound of them, and he would get through. Now he memorizes some of his favorite poems and starts reciting them in his head when he gets angry instead of talking back. According to several people this gives him a sort of glazed expression, but it gets him in less trouble. 

He stays pissed off. He’s pretty sure he owes it to the world to stay pissed off. But he’s learning to hold back more. He spends a lot of time listening to the new Rilo Kiley album and [the song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0sy7y54XAE) with the line that goes, _and you’ll better and you’ll be smarter, and more grown up, and a better daughter or son and a real good friend._ He tries to lie a little less, but he keeps working at Walmart and he keeps telling Luke he’s going to school. He’s polite to Lorelai. And he doesn’t talk to Rory.

Thanksgiving rolls around and he talks to his manager about taking most of December and January off -- for medical purposes, he says, but he doesn’t get more specific than that. Rory and Lorelai come to the diner for what seems, from their conversation with Luke, to be one of four Thanksgiving dinners they’re having today. He stays behind the counter, reading _Crime and Punishment_ chewing at the cuff of his sleeve. 

Then it’s the first of December and he takes to tracing the outline of his notebook in his pocket, counting off the days until his surgery. It’s started to become real to him, though he’s still not quite sure how he pulled the money and paperwork together. He feels a little as though he’s getting away with something. And in a way he is -- Luke keeps asking him where he got the money, and he keeps evading. But it’s really happening, in two weeks, then one week, then just a few days. 

Luke takes him out to the train station. “You got everything? Insurance information? Ticket? You know how you’re getting to your weird friend?”

“He’s not weird, Luke.”

“He lives alone in Boston and he’s twenty. That’s weird.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“But you’ve got everything?”

Jess knows himself well enough that he checked his backpack four times that morning. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got everything.”

“Okay. Alright. Good.”

They stand there in the train station in silence for a moment, Luke twisting a map he picked up at the front desk in his hands. 

“Listen,” Jess says, “my train will be here any minute. I should probably go out onto the platform.”

Luke nods, and Jess is about to walk away when Luke catches him by the shoulder and pulls him into a hug. Quietly, so only Jess can hear, Luke says, “I’m proud of you, kid. As long as you didn’t steal the money for all this.”

“I didn’t,” Jess says. “Promise.”

“Alright, then. I’m proud of you. Call me as soon as you get there, and as soon as you’re out of surgery, okay? I want to hear how you’re doing. Make sure your weird friend doesn’t let you get an infection.”

“I won’t.” 

Luke lets go of him and they step apart. Jess thinks he can see a hint of a tear in one of his eyes, but he doesn’t look too closely. “Okay,” Luke says. “I’ll see you in six weeks.”

“See you.”

Out on the platform, he settles his backpack on the ground between his feet. It’s a cold day, but the sun is out so he turns his face up to it and thinks, this is real. This is real, this is real. On the train he tries and fails to read and ends up watching the trees flash by, tapping his fingers against the window as he listens to [The Mountain Goats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IsXKMkDAMQ), and falls asleep with his hands still twitching.

~

Jess’ friend, Peter drives him to his pre-op appointments and to his surgery, sits in the waiting room and takes him back home after it’s all finished. Then there’s six weeks to spend in in the apartment with limited mobility, constantly having to deal with changing his bandages and his surgical drains. Needless to say, he’s ready to leave by the time it’s over, but he’s glad for all the books he brought and all the books Peter went to the library to get for him. It’s been a productive month and a half of reading, even if he’s been tempted at various points to fling himself out the window for the sake of a change of scenery. He spends the train ride back to Stars Hollow glued to the window, watching the towns pass. And then he’s back at the train station where Luke is waiting for him. They don’t talk much on the car ride back to the diner but Luke gives him a big smile and a slap on the back that he takes to mean he’s glad Jess is back. 

Some of the snow has melted, but otherwise the town looks unchanged. It feels like he’s been away for ages. He smoothes his shirt down, running his hand over his chest. It’s still sore, and it will be for a while, but he’s happy to ignore the discomfort in order to feel his own flat chest under his shirt instead of the stiff material of a binder. 

Back at the diner, Luke asks if he wants to rest but he says he prefers to take a walk. It’s been a while since he could do that, and he’s missed the freedom to go where he pleases. He drops his backpack off inside and walks through the town to the bridge. It’s still his favorite spot here, away from all the people and the obnoxious guitar player who’s somehow always playing in the square. His last memory of Rory here makes the place a little sad, but really he’s alright with that. For a long time he sits on the bridge, swinging his feet about the water, eyes closed and listening to the small sounds in the trees around him.

~

Before leaving for Massachusetts, Jess had been determined to keep up his resolution to give Rory space. If she wants to be friends again, she’ll come to him. No need to push her before she’s ready. But once he’s back in Stars Hollow, he can’t resist the urge to talk to her and he gets his chance when she’s in the diner, catching her by the elbow and pulling her into the stairway.

“Jess, what the-”

“Can you -- sorry, this is weird. I mean I know we’re -- whatever, listen, you’re the only one I can tell.”

She tilts her head at him.

“Come up to the apartment?” He asks.

“Okay,” she says, still looking hesitant, glancing over her shoulder. But she follows him.

“Jess, what’s going on?” She asks when they’re upstairs.

“I know this is weird and we’re not. Friends, I don’t know. But you’re the only person here I’m out to, so.”

Her eyes widen with understanding, and she loses her air of hostility. “Okay.”

“When I was gone, when I was out of town -- it wasn’t just to visit my mom. I was in Massachusetts. Getting surgery.” He’s rattling with nerves and he knows she can probably see it, but right now he’s okay with that. This one is one thing that, no matter where they stand with each other, he trusts her to be good about. 

“Oh,” she says, softly. “Oh!”

“Top surgery, for my chest. And -- okay, tell me if this is weird -- but I was wondering if I could show you? Because it’s. I don’t know, I don’t know to explain it, I just want to show someone, I want someone to see.”

She’s nodding, despite his inarticulateness. “Yeah. Yeah, you can show me.” 

He’s just wearing a t-shirt -- something he never used to do when he was binding -- so it’s easy to take off, though he still has to be careful about lifting his arms over his head. It’s definitely not how he’s ever imagined taking his shirt off for the first time in front of Rory Gilmore, but it’s somehow better. As soon as he has his shirt over his head, he can see her smiling, lifting her hand up to touch her lips. She nods then looks up at him and says, “It looks good. It looks really really good. Right, you know.”

“Yeah,” he says with a little laugh. “That’s what I keep thinking when I look in the mirror.”

For a moment it seems like she’s gonna reach out and touch him, but then she folds her arms across her chest and says, “I should probably get back down there before my mom comes looking for me.”

He nods. “Yeah, go on. Thanks for coming up here.”

“Anytime,” she says with a smile, and turns to go. He pulls his shirt back on and as he’s straightening it, she stops at the door and turns back to say, “I’m really, really happy for you, Jess.”

“Thanks.”

After she leaves, he stands there a moment longer, hand splayed across his chest. She hasn’t smiled at him like that in a long time. 

~

The next morning, he fills Rory and Lorelai’s cups with coffee as usual, not making eye contact as usual, and Lorelai says, “Hey Jess.”

He’s so shocked that he almost over fills Lorelai’s cup, but he stops himself just in time and looks at her. She’s actually smiling at him. He can’t imagine that she knows about the surgery, but he supposes Rory must have told her that the two of them are okay. Because as long as he’s known them, Lorelai and Rory are always on the same side, at least in public. So if Lorelai is smiling at him, it’s because Rory isn’t pissed anymore. Cautious, like a child wary to touch a doorknob for fear of an electric shock, he glances at Rory. And she’s smiling at him too. He smiles back, but it only broadens when he turns away and can look down. He’s not quite ready for anyone in this town to see him really smile like this, completely and absurdly happy. 

~

Their first real conversation after that takes place on a bench in the square, to which Rory had dragged him from the diner.

“Sorry,” she says once they’re sitting together. “I didn’t mean to, uh, manhandle you. But I didn’t want my mom to hear this.”

Jess raises an eyebrow.

“Nothing scandalous!” Rory adds quickly. “Well, nothing genuinely scandalous. My grandmother would certainly be shocked, but you won’t be.”

“The suspense is killing me.”

“Okay, okay! So, um, I kissed Paris.”

Jess’ eyebrow goes back up. “Paris Gellar?”

“Yep, that’s the one. One and only.” Rory is obviously nervous, fidgeting with her hands. “And I. I really liked it. Like I really, really liked it. And I was thinking about our conversation, where I was freaking out about the idea of being bisexual, on like a totally theoretical basis. And now it’s not so theoretical anymore, in fact I’m pretty sure. I’m gonna tell my mom tonight, I think, but I wanted to talk to you first because I knew you’d be fine with it and -- I wanted the first person I told to be, you know, safe.”

Jess nods. “I get that.”

“I figured you would,” Rory says with a small smile. 

“So are you two-”

“Oh, no,” Rory says. “At least, not yet. Paris is kind of freaked out? Like, as soon as it was over she was talking, saying like ‘Oh my god, I’m a lesbian, what will this do to my career.’ And I mean obviously she’s allowed to freak out but I don’t think it would be an auspicious start to our relationship for me to be whispering sweet nothings in her ear while she charts out the effect of her lesbianism on her potential future as a doctor or a lawyer.”

“Sweet nothings?” Jess says with a laugh, and Rory rolls her eyes. “Yeah, that makes sense. You like her, though.”

Rory nods immediately. “It’s funny,” she says, looking across the park. “It’s not like it was with Dean, or -- it’s not like I can’t stop thinking about her and desperately want to kiss her. It’s more like -- I really hope she’s always in my life. And it would be really nice if I could kiss her at some point. But if she needs some time to figure things out, that’s okay.”

“I get that,” Jess says. “I mean, I think I usually get crushes on guys and girls in different ways.”

Rory’s head snaps back to look at him. “Wait, what?”

Jess laughs. “I’m bi, too.”

“Oh,” Rory says. Then she smiles at him. “That’s cool.” 

“Listen, I hope things go well with your mom, but if they don’t -- call me, okay? You shouldn’t have to be alone with that.”

Rory nods again. “Thanks.” She picks at the hem of her jacket, hesitating. Then she says, “I wanted to apologize. About earlier. I mean, after the danceathon.” 

Jess shrugs. “I mean, it was fair. I was shitty.”

Rory smiles down at her hands. “Yeah, okay, you were. But I maybe said some things I shouldn’t have. Paris and I have -- I mean obviously, I guess -- been pretty close lately. And I was talking to her about the whole thing and she said something that made a lot of sense that I hadn’t thought about before. I was, uh, complaining to her about you at some point and she said that sometimes good people do bad things even when they try not to. And I said that didn’t make sense, and she said it’s sort of like yawning. Like an instinct you can’t hold back no matter how hard you try.” Rory flashes a smile at him. “You know, I think she’s sort of like you. In unexpected ways. Anyway, what I realized is that you can’t always help having bad days.”

Jess nods, not quite able to look at Rory. 

“But still, you’ve been getting better. I’ve noticed. I think everyone has. You’re -- nicer. I hope you don’t mind hearing that.”

“I don’t.” He pauses, pressing his tongue to his front teeth and considering how to say what he’s thinking. “I didn’t ever want to be mean. I just -- being nice, it’s easy for you. Like breathing. It’s not like that for me.”

Rory nods, and to his surprise she reaches out to squeeze his hand. “Paris says I need to work on seeing things from other points of view. I think she’s right. Anyway, I thought I should let you know that you’re not the only one trying to get better.”

~

Over the course of the next few weeks, their conversations become more regular, and sometimes when Rory and Lorelai sit at the counter, Rory ends up talking more to Jess than to her mother. They start swapping books again, too. She gives him a thin book of Rilke poems and he falls in love immediately, filling the margins with his thoughts and questions. When she returns his copy of Crime and Punishment, there’s a letter tucked inside with her responses to him.

_Jess-  
You wrote “I can’t stop thinking about how this is in translation, and wondering what it sounds like in German.” I actually found a recording of someone reading it in German, I can play it for you some day. In the meantime, know this -- it’s beautiful. I mean, really. Like music out of letters, all these long vowels and soft consonants in the back of the throat. It kind of makes me want to learn the language, honestly. Also -- I’m surprised you liked it so much! I don’t know, I’ve always thought of you as someone who likes his poetry very political, and these aren’t really. But I’m glad you enjoyed them, they’re some of my favorites. Though, thinking of political poetry -- you should look up Milosz, he’s a Polish poet I think you’d really enjoy._

The letter goes on to answer more of his questions and recommend other people, but it’s the first paragraph he reads over and over again before folding it up and tucking it into his notebook to carry it with him. That evening Lorelai and Rory come to eat at the diner and as he’s setting down their plates, he says to Rory, “You said I should read Milosz.”

Already taking a bite of her burger, Rory nods.

“I know him already. And you’re right, I do like him.”

Swallowing with impressive force, Rory says, “I knew you would!”

He’s about to recite a line, but he stops himself, feeling odd with Lorelai there. “I can make a list of my favorites for you.”

She smiles up at him. “That’d be nice.”

Later, when Lorelai’s gone and Rory is still hanging around working on some homework, he comes and sits across from her.

“School?”

She makes a vague noise of agreement, writes something down, and then looks up at him. “Hey,” she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Earlier, when we were talking about Milosz. You were thinking about a line.”

“Hmm?”

“There was a line of a Milosz poem you were thinking of.”

“How did you know that?”

She shrugs. “Intuition. What was the line.”

He rubs at the corner of his jaw, then recites. “What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?/A connivance with official lies,/A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,/Readings for sophomore girls./That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,/That I discovered, late, its salutary aim/In this an only this I find salvation.”

He opens his eyes and she’s staring at him with an expression he hasn’t seen before. “That’s from ‘[Dedication](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49458),’ isn’t it?”

He nods.

Rory sucks her lip in, thoughtful. “I like the way you recite,” she says. “You sound different from yourself.”

He shrugs, self-conscious. “It’s just how I hear it.”

Rory chews on the end of her pencil, considering him. “You wouldn’t do that in front of other people, would you? I mean, people who aren’t me.”

He lets out a low bark of a laugh and gets up to return to the counter. “Hell, no.”

~

They get into the habit of meeting in the library on Friday evenings when Rory is back from Chilton and Jess gets off work. Both of them know it pretty well by now and they both have their favorite spots. This Friday they’re in the modern American fiction section, which is one of Jess’ favorite spots. They’re both scanning the shelves when Rory turns around, leaning back and looking at Jess with a curious expression.

“You’re thinking something,” Jess says, glancing at her. “That can’t be good.” In his peripheral vision, he sees her roll her eyes. 

“I was thinking -- I don’t want to mess it up this time.”

Her voice has gone serious, so Jess turns his attention to her. “Mess what up?”

She catches the corner of his jacket and pulls him, stumbling, toward her. He finds his feet before she loops her arms around his neck and says, “Kissing you.”

It’s different this time. He’s less surprised, for one thing, and it’s not over in a blink like the last time, so he has time to settle his hands on her hips, pull her closer, reach up to bury a hand in her hair. It really is as soft as it looks. Moving his hand along her jaw, he thinks fleetingly that he hasn’t been so simply happy in a good long time. 

She pulls away from him with a small, contented sound and settles her head on his chest. “I didn’t, did I?” She asks.

“Hmm?” Jess is still feeling a little dazed.

“I didn’t mess it up.”

“Oh,” he says, and presses a kiss to her forehead. “No, you didn’t.” He runs his fingers through her hair, twirling a strand of it around his pinky. “Is this -- are we gonna be okay?”

Rory burrows against his chest and he winces in pain. “Oh!” She says, stepping back. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m hurting you.”

He pulls her close again. “You weren’t before, just go easy.”

“Okay,” she says. “I can do that. And I think we’re gonna be okay. We’re pretty smart.”

He snorts. “I don’t think this really has to do with being smart.”

“No?”

“Just a guess, but I think plenty of people admitted to Harvard are incapable of maintaining healthy relationships.”

“I guess.” She plays with the hem of his shirt, slipping a finger beneath it to trace the line of his hip, and he clenches his teeth together to keep himself from shivering. “But we’ll make it work.”

And truth be told, he’s scared because he knows himself and he knows Rory, knows that she’ll be off to college in a year and he’ll be god knows where, knows that they’ve both managed to screw up pretty badly in the relationships they’ve had so far. But right now all he wants to be thinking about is the fact that Rory just kissed him, for real this time, and that she’s still here, still close. And he doesn’t want her to be scared, so he says, “Okay.” 

They leave the library with Jess’ arm around Rory’s shoulders, and it feels easy and right somehow, like they’ve been doing this for ages.

“How do you think Lorelai’ll take it?” Jess asks.

“Oh, she’ll get over it.”

“Man, that doesn’t sound promising.”

“Listen,” Rory says with a laugh. “She’ll have to love you because I love you, end of story.”

Jess knows, though there’s no outward sign of it, that they both realize what she’s said at the same moment. I love you. She probably doesn’t mean it quite like that, he thinks. They’ve been together for less than two hours. Definitely not long enough to be saying I love you. But still, he can’t forget the sound of it in her mouth, and at the corner he stops, pulling her close to kiss her, hard. Maybe he’s not allowed to say it yet, but he can show it all he wants. 

“Hi,” she says when he pulls away. 

“Hi.”

“So, are you walking me home or are we stuck on this corner forever.”

“Corner doesn’t sound to bad.”

“Jess.”

“I’m walking you home.”

And so he puts his arm back around her and they head back to Lorelai’s place where he stands at the foot of the steps until she’s through the door. He stands there for a moment longer, hands in his pockets, before he begins slowly to walk back to the diner. He remembers that night more than a year ago when he’d returned her copy of _Howl_ , how happy he’d been. He’d thought, then, that it wasn’t going to get any better than that, that he was going to feel lucky every time this girl smiled at him. And now -- and now. The smell of her hair clings to his shirt. One day, he thinks, he’ll fall asleep with her head on his chest and that scent will be with him always, always, like the words he carries around in his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @toomanyfeelings5 on tumblr for proofing!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He lets go of the thread on his jeans to bite into the palm of his hand and thinks for a while before he speaks. They’ve made an agreement, him and Rory: she tries to pay more attention and notice when he’s upset, and when she does notice, he tries to actually talk about it. It’s difficult for both of them, but they’re getting better at it. Jess looks at his hand and the faint marks of his teeth. He says, “I think I’m just scared about things changing.” Still examining the skin of his hand, he goes on. “I like how things are right now with you and me and I’m scared of things being different after you leave.” He hates that word, _scared_ , but it’s true and he’s trying to lie less so he uses it anyway. “I don’t want to stay here without you but if I go -- I’m scared I’ll bolt, I’ll just go to New York and get a job and an apartment and never talk to you again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter where I say "screw canon" and Jess and Rory talk about their feelings and grow as humans

Being with Rory is easy. It’s maybe the easiest thing he’s ever done. She understands by tone or gesture what he can’t or won’t put into words, she’s content to spend their evenings together sitting and reading, she doesn’t mind him tapping his foot or rattling his leg or chewing on his knuckles or doing any of the dozen other things people are constantly telling him off for. Rory is easy. It’s everything else that’s difficult. 

There’s Lorelai, to begin with. Though Jess has no doubt that she will, as Rory said, get used to it, he isn’t enjoying the time she’s taking to do so. Then there are the grandparents. Rory has told him that he absolutely has to come over for dinner sometime soon, and he’s not looking forward to it. Luke, for whatever reason, has decided that it’s his sacred duty to protect Rory from Jess and has set up strict rules on how and when they’re allowed to be in the apartment together. All of Rory’s friends in Stars Hollow have only gotten more hostile towards him since they’ve started dating. He thinks he could get along with Paris if she were around more often, but given what had happened between her and Rory, he isn’t so sure how she’s feeling about him these days. And on top of that, there’s school. He’s known all along that he isn’t going to get good grades, what with working full time at Walmart, but he’s always thought he could make up for it. If they gave him his exams today, he’d be fine. But he keeps getting notes from teachers about his attendance record being unacceptable. He hasn’t shown any of these notes to Luke, hoping he’ll be able to fix it without telling any adults. In March he quits his job and starts going to all his classes, though he keeps a book on his lap to read during lectures and drums out a steady rhythm on the edge of his desk. Even with these distractions, he hates it, hates the neat rows of desks and the chatter of students, hates the cafeteria food and the incompetent teachers. 

“It’s just a few more months,” Rory says, not looking up from her textbook. “You’ll get through it.”

Jess taps his foot against the leg of the table and looks out the window. Rory’s getting better about this -- understanding that what’s easy for her isn’t easy for everyone -- but she forgets sometimes, and it’s frustrating to see her complete lack of concern. Some of it, of course, is because she knows he’s smart. She trusts him to get through his classes just fine. But she doesn’t know, can’t know what a brutal grind it’s turning his life into, having to be in that building seven hours a day. “I just,” he says, looking for any words to convey it. “I just fucking hate it, that’s all.”

She looks up and smiles at him sadly. “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.” She tilts her head at him in the particular way she does when she’s trying to read him. “When I finish my homework we can go somewhere.”

 _Go somewhere_ means to the bridge. It’s the most privacy they’re likely to find in Stars Hollow, and both of them like it there. Usually when they go there Jess will end up with his head in Rory’s lap, listening to her read aloud. Which is a good evening in Jess’ view. If he could spend the rest of his life like that, he thinks he’d be pretty well contented. 

“Let’s run away,” he says, because that’s what he says when he’s miserable and wants to say so without saying so.

Rory says, “Okay,” because that’s what she says when she wants to say, _I’m sorry._

Jess rubs the knuckles of his thumb against the edge of the table and wonders if she’d actually ever consider running away with him. He’d do it, no question, if Rory would come with him. But she won’t, and truth be told that’s part of what he likes about her. He likes that she’s happy in school, that she’ll finish high school with honors, that she’ll end up at an Ivy League, that’s she’ll excel there. It’s not for him, but he likes that it’s for her. Just as long as she can keep honest and stay away from the rich kids who think they own the world. Just as long as she remembers that she’s getting this education so she can change the world, not so that she can settle into it more comfortably than others who aren’t so lucky. 

“Hey,” Rory says, closing her book. “Would you take me to the prom?”

“I thought I was supposed to ask you that.”

Rory purses her lips. “Don’t be reactionary. Listen, there’s a dance at Chilton, but really I’d like to go to the Stars Hollow High prom. And you’re my in.”

“I’m also your boyfriend, so unless you want to go with Lane-”

“Lane is going with Dave.”

“So I’m not even your first choice?”

“Oh, what, like your first choice would be to go to the Stars Hollow High Prom?”

“Anything for you, darling,” he says, and despite his sarcastic tone, he does mean it.

“So we can go?”

“Yeah, we can go.”

“You’ll wear the tux and everything?” Rory says, wide-eyed in mock disbelief.

“I’ll even rent a limo.”

“My hero.”

“Finish your homework so we can go.”

“Okay, okay.”

~

As March wears on, Rory becomes increasingly anxious about college acceptances and Jess becomes increasingly grateful that he isn’t going to college. 

“It’ll be fine,” he says as they sit on the porch at Lorelai’s and Rory stress-eats a carton of chocolate mint ice cream. “Now gimme some of that.”

“I didn’t apply to enough places,” Rory says, reluctantly handing over the carton. “There’s a real chance I didn’t get in anywhere.”

“You’re smart, you’ve got good grades, you did well on the SAT. You’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but you know what they say about college acceptance these days! Being smart isn’t enough. Having good extracurriculars isn’t enough. There are more qualified people out there than there are spots in the freshman class at Yale.”

“So it’s definitely gonna be Yale?” Jess asks. He’s not sure how that happened, but he also doesn’t care all that much, as long as it’s what Rory wants.

“If I get in.”

“You’ll get in.”

“Don’t jinx it!”

“You’ll get in, poo-poo.”

“Huh?”

“Poo-poo.” 

Rory stares at him for several seconds before saying, “Jess, what the hell?”

“It’s what you say after you say something good is gonna happen, to avoid bad luck. Like crossing your fingers or whatever.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

Jess excavates an especially large piece of chocolate from the ice cream and puts it in his mouth. “It’s a Jewish thing.”

“Ah. Anyway, there’s a real chance that I won’t get in anywhere and I’ll have to take a gap year and travel all over the world so that when I apply again, I’ll have a good story to tell and they won’t reject me again.”

“Wow, yeah, I gotta hand it to you Gilmore, a year travelling around the world sounds _terrible._ ”

“Oh, hush up,” Rory says, and grabs the ice cream carton away from him. 

“Yale isn’t far from here,” Jess says, trying to make it sound casual. “Less than thirty miles.” He knows the exact number, but he’s not going to say that.

“Yeah, it’d be nice to be able to come home pretty often.”

“And I could come visit you.”

“Yeah,” Rory says, smiling at him. “That’d be nice, too.”

Which does something to alleviate Jess’ own mounting anxiety about what Rory leaving for college will mean for the two of them. 

Rory is looking at him, tapping the spoon against her lips thoughtfully. 

“What?” Jess asks.

“I was just wondering,” she says. “What are you planning to do next year? When you’re done with school?”

Jess shrugs. He hasn’t given it all that much thought. “I’ll work at the diner. I dunno. Read. Write.”

“You won’t be bored here?”

“I’m always bored here.”

“Not when you’re with me.”

“Fair point,” Jess concedes.

“I just meant, you’re not going back to the city?”

“I dunno,” Jess says, feeling increasingly uncomfortable with this conversation. “I mean, eventually, probably. I’d like to stay close to you.”

“I don’t want you to stay in a town you hate just to be less than thirty miles from me,” Rory says. “And New York isn’t so far.”

Jess shrugs. He doesn’t really want to think about this. He looks down at the frayed hem of his pants and starts to pick at a thread there.

“I’m just saying, you don’t have to stay in Connecticut for me.”

He nods, still looking down.

Rory scoots closer to him and reaches out like she’s going move his hand, but thinks better of it, running her hand through his hair instead. He moves into the touch. “You’re upset,” she says. 

Jess shrugs again. 

“What’s wrong?”

He lets go of the thread on his jeans to bite into the palm of his hand and thinks for a while before he speaks. They’ve made an agreement, him and Rory: she tries to pay more attention and notice when he’s upset, and when she does notice, he tries to actually talk about it. It’s difficult for both of them, but they’re getting better at it. Jess looks at his hand and the faint marks of his teeth. He says, “I think I’m just scared about things changing.” Still examining the skin of his hand, he goes on. “I like how things are right now with you and me and I’m scared of things being different after you leave.” He hates that word, _scared,_ but it’s true and he’s trying to lie less so he uses it anyway. “I don’t want to stay here without you but if I go -- I’m scared I’ll bolt, I’ll just go to New York and get a job and an apartment and never talk to you again.”

“Why would you do that?” Rory asks, sounding genuinely confused.

Jess laughs. “I mean, that’s the part that makes it scary. I don’t have a fucking clue why I’d do it, but I would.”

“Hmm.” Rory leans against him. “Would you be less scared if I told you I won’t let you disappear?”

Jess laces their fingers together and nods. 

“Okay,” Rory says. “Well, I won’t.”

And they sit like that for a while, Jess tapping out a rhythm against Rory’s knuckles.

~

Rory gets into Yale. She gets into Harvard, too, and some other places, but it’s Yale she’s set on. Her grandparents throw her a party which, mercifully, Rory says Jess can skip. 

“You’ll meet them another time,” she says. “I think it should just be Gilmores.”

Jess, in a fit of extravagance and pride in his girlfriend, buys an entire cake and the two of them eat it on the bridge.

“You know this is ridiculous,” Rory says around a mouthful of cake.

“Uh-huh,” Jess says.

“And delicious.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The message doesn’t make much sense, though,” she says, looking at what remains of the lettering in blue frosting. “Happy Anniversary?”

“Listen, there was a limited stock. None of the cakes said, ‘Congrats on being a genius, Rory Gilmore,’ so I just went with the one that looked tastiest.”

Rory grins at him and takes another bite. Then she says, “You know, Paris is in a state of despair.”

“Oh god. Did she not get in anywhere?”

“Oh, she got in plenty of places. She got into Yale, for one. But she had her heart set on Harvard, and she got rejected, and now she thinks the entire world is falling apart.”

“Is Yale really that different from Harvard?”

Rory gives him a look, so he puts up his hands and says, “Okay, okay, it’s different. But it’s still Ivy League. She’ll get over it.”

“I was actually hoping you would come talk to her.”

“Me?” Jess asks, skeptical.

“Yeah, she likes you.”

“I thought she was a lesbian.”

“She doesn’t like you like that, silly. And yes, she is. But she likes you as a person.”

“I also thought she hated me for liking Bukowski.”

“Okay, one, you’re still a fool for liking Bukowski and two, I think that’s part of the appeal. Not that she likes Bukowski, but she likes a challenge. And you challenge her. Not many people do. And you’re not terrified of her like everyone at Chilton, and you’ve got a very devil-may-care attitude which I think would help her out.”

“You’re not bringing me in as an example of how much more of a failure she could be?”

Rory rolls her eyes. “You’re not a failure just because you aren’t going to college. But I’m saying, everyone around her is so invested in colleges right now. Everyone’s talking about where they got in, where they got waitlisted, and that’s not your world, you know? I think it would be good for her to talk to someone who still remembers that there are things in the world other than college applications.”

“Alright.”

“You’ll come with me?”

“Sure.”

“What a champ. Braving Paris.”

“She doesn’t scare me.”

“Maybe she should,” Rory says, reaching out to wipe some frosting from the corner of his mouth. “She’s pretty scary.”

~

That evening they go to Paris’ house, which is intimidatingly huge and fancy. He leans close to Rory and says, “You know, I knew rich people existed but actually seeing it up close is something else.”

Rory shrugs. “It’s not that different from my grandparents’ house. Which you still have to visit, by the way.”

“I’m not good with rich people.”

“You’re fine with Paris.”

“Yeah, well, Paris is a weirdo. We have some common ground to work with.”

Rory leads them upstairs to Paris’ room, where Paris is redecorating. In the middle of the room is a box stuffed with Harvard memorabilia. 

“Hey, Paris,” Rory says.

Paris looks up. “Hi Rory. Hi Jess.”

“You seem to be doing better than earlier.”

“I’ve decided to get a new attitude,” Paris says. “I’ve decided to say, _Fuck Harvard_. Harvard is dead to me. I’m going to Yale, and I’m going to burn everything in my room that has the word Harvard on it.”

Jess perks up at this. He loves fire.

“Are you sure about that?” Rory asks.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Rory says, tugging her jacket off. “If it’ll make you feel better.”

So the three of them pull down posters, pennants, newspaper clippings. Almost everything on the walls is Harvard-related, so it takes a while. When they’re done they go out to the barbecue pit in the back yard with two boxes full of the stuff. Jess hands Paris his cigarette lighter and they stand there together, watching it burn. 

At some point Rory goes inside to use the bathroom and Jess and Paris are left in silence. Then Paris asks, “What does it feel like? Knowing you’ll be done with school after this year.”

“Like a relief.”

Paris nods. “Sometimes I think I’d be happier if I could just quit, you know? Leave it all behind. Make my life about something else. But I can’t, and not just because of my family. Because of me, because of the way I am, because I start missing school around the fourth of July every summer.”

“Rory’s like that too.”

“Yeah. She makes me feel less alone.”

“Me too,” he says, and they look at one another. “But in different ways.”

“Yeah.” Paris hesitates a moment, then says, “I know she told you about the two of us kissing, by the way. I hope you’re okay with it.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you know. Guys.”

Jess snorts. “I’m not the most typical guy.”

“I guess not.”

“Listen, I would only mind it if it was cheating. If she kissed you while we were dating and we hadn’t talked about it.”

Paris raises her eyebrows. “But if you had talked about it?”

Jess shrugs. “I’d be open to alternate arrangements.”

“Huh,” Paris says. “That’s very modern of you.”

“Don’t tell me I seemed old-fashioned to you before.”

She smiles at him. “No, I guess not.”

~

The rest of that spring is hectic. Jess is trying to make up for his months of missed school and working at the diner, and trying to think a bit about next year. Without Rory here, he probably will want to move out, and to do that he’ll have to build up his savings again. Rory is trying to finish her last few months of high school strong, and supporting her mom because it’s that spring, too, when the inn burns down and Lorelai and Sookie decide to start a new inn together. 

But really it’s all going fine until Jess tries to buy prom tickets, which is when he learns that despite all the effort he’s put in, he’s still on academic probation, which means no prom and quite possibly no diploma. The timing is bad, too, because he and Rory are going to a party where Lane’s band is playing that night, and he’s a long way from in the mood.

It’s not so bad when they first get there and it’s just Lane’s band setting up and the guy whose house it is trying to party-proof the place. He’s in a shit mood, but he’s used to being in a shit mood. Rory pokes at him a bit about it but he doesn’t want to talk about it right now and he doesn’t have the energy to be grateful to Rory for noticing. As more and more people show up, though, it gets worse. It’s loud and crowded and it stinks of teenagers and junk food and all of it is making Jess feel like he’s going to pass out or scream. 

The band plays a set and he spends the whole time rocking slightly with his knuckles between his teeth. When it ends, he finds Rory in the crowd.

“Let’s go, let’s get out of here.”

“Go where?” She asks.

“Go anywhere.”

“It’s early.”

“It’s boring.” 

“Jess, we can’t just go.”

“Yes we can.”

“The bands playing a whole other set.”

“They can do it without us.”

“I don’t wanna leave. Now come on, try to have fun. Talk, mingle.”

“I don’t wanna talk to anyone else, I don’t like anyone else.” Which is true. Spending more time at school has only deepened his instinctive dislike of his classmates. Here, among these people, he feels like he’s from a different planet, or maybe some place deep under the sea. 

“I don’t wanna leave,” Rory says. “I need to stay here for Lane. Come on.”

And he gets that, he really does. She gets on her tiptoes to kiss him. “Gloomy,” she says, frowning at him.

“We’ll go right when they get done playing, okay?”

“Sure, grandpa.”

“Rory.”

“We’ll go then, I promise.”

He doesn’t know how long it’ll be until the end of the set, though, and he doesn’t think he can make it through much more of all this noise so he slips upstairs to a dark and quiet room to sit and slow down. That’s where he is when Rory finds him. 

“Sad boy,” she says, reaching up to cup his face, and he turns his head to kiss the palm of her hand. “What’s wrong? You were looking forward to this party. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something did. Come on. Tell me.” 

He remembers their deal, that part of it is him being honest with her about how he’s feeling and why. But his head’s still spinning from the noise and the crowd downstairs and he doesn’t have the heart for it right now. _Soon_ , he promises himself. But instead of saying anything, he kisses her.

“You’re not tired of me, are you?” Rory asks.

That’s an awful thought, so he pulls her close again and kisses her harder because he wants her to know that that’s not true. 

“That’s a pretty good answer,” she says, smiling up at him. “But you still didn’t answer my question.” 

He shrugs. “Do we have to talk about it now?”

“No. You just seemed down, so-”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” 

“It’s not about me, is it?”

“No,” Jess snaps. “Not everything is about you.”

“Jeez,” Rory says, stepping away from him. “I didn’t mean-”

He knows, he knows that he’ll regret everything as soon as he stops talking, but he can’t seem to stop just yet. “There’s stuff going on in my life besides you, okay? You’re going to college, you’ve got it figured out. You’re going to fucking Yale, okay, and your rich grandparents are footing the bill and you’re going to be fine. Meanwhile I have no idea where I’ll live after I move out, I don’t even know if I’m gonna graduate high school. I’m going to be broke for the foreseeable future and the last employer I have to recommend me is fucking Walmart. So no, it’s not about you.” 

At some point he’d started shouting, and now he can see tears in Rory’s eyes and he stops. And he was right, he regrets it right away. Rory turns on her heel and slips out the door, ignoring him as he calls out for her.

By the time he gets to the top of the stairs she’s down on the landing, and Dean is there. And yes, he can see how bad it looks. Rory, clearly coming from having been with him, crying, But he needs to get outside, needs to cool off where he won’t hurt anyone, so he walks past them and toward the door. But then there’s a hand on his shoulder, turning him around, and pain splits across the side of his face before he can properly register what’s happening. It’s Dean, of course it’s Dean, and at this point Jess can’t care that the guy is twice his size or that Rory wouldn’t want him to get into a fight. He tackles Dean with everything he has and the two of them crash through the house. Dean throws him against the counter, against the fridge, into a wall until his whole body hurts, but he’s still throwing punches, taking pleasure in knowing that this is finally his chance to hurt Dean. Eventually the two of them get thrown out onto the lawn and then there are cops and he has a moment to catch his breath. He hears Rory saying his name but he just turns and goes, walking without thinking. 

In this town, walking without thinking will inevitably take him out to the bridge, where he stands, trying to just breathe for a while. He hears footsteps behind him and knows it’s Rory. He wants to turn to her and bury his face in her neck, to fall to his knees, to lie down with her and cry it out. But he can’t, not yet. He knows that. 

“Jess.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have -- I’m sorry I yelled at you.” He turns to face her, rubbing the heel of his palm into his eye. “I’m sorry I fought with Dean, I’m sorry I was sulking all night, I just. I found out I can’t get tickets to the damn prom because I’m on academic probation, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to graduate. That’s what happened, that’s why I was -- and sometimes, you know, noise and people are just too much, I get -- I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I’m not saying what I did was okay, I’m just saying I wasn’t trying to be a jackass.”

He finally looks at Rory, and she nods. “Thank you,” she says, and reaches out to take his hand and pull him closer. “I’m glad you said all that.” 

Jess shrugs, and Rory straightens his jacket then reaches up to touch a cut by his eyebrow. He winces and she pulls her hand back. “We can go back to my house to get some anti-septic for that.” And that, Jess knows, means forgiveness. “Seriously,” she says, “I know it wasn’t easy. Thank you.”

He can’t talk right now, so he presses his face to her hair and breathes in, long and deep. 

“You gotta tell me when these things happen, okay? Not just bottle it up. Nothing good happens when you bottle it up.”

Jess nods into her hair. 

“And I can help! I want to help, okay? With school and everything. I can help, but I can’t if you won’t tell me.”

“I know,” Jess says when he gets his voice back. “I’m sorry.”

Rory wraps her arms around his waist and pulls him closer. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.”

She steps back to look up at him, reaching up to touch his face. “Are you okay? It looked like Dean was hitting pretty hard.”

“Yeah, so was I.”

“But you’re okay?”

He shrugs. “I’ll be fine.” 

He pulls her close again and for a while they just stand there and Jess feels okay and safe. “Hey,” he says. “I love you.” He hasn’t said it before, even if he’s thought it constantly for the past few months.

“I love you, too,” Rory says. “Even on your bad days.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @toomanyfeelings5 on tumblr for proofing!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the growing darkness he looks over at her, the silhouette of her face, features indistinct in that dusk light that obscures all detail. Still, he would know that profile, the curve of her forehead, the elegant line of her nose, the slight point of her chin. He feels ludicrous. He feels like he understands all the poetry he had adored without being able to make sense of the feeling behind it. He wants, he thinks, to be a crazy teenager in love with Rory for the rest of time. But he also wants to have known her, to have been with her so long that he can reach out his hand without looking and take hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bet you'd seen the last of me rofl. This chapter is Mushy but my proofer said it's an appropriate amount of mushy, not too mushy to live and by god this is fanfiction, if I can't be a gay old sap here I can't be a gay old sap anywhere, and what would be the point, really.

Over the next few weeks, Rory helps Jess get through all his schoolwork and even comes with him to the principal’s office to argue that his effort now should at least help make up for the months he skipped. They figure out how to put Jess’ bursts of intense energy and focus to good use. But the best of it, at least for Jess, is Rory’s genuine pride in him. It’s the best reward he could ask for. And at the end of May, he turns his papers in, passes his final exams, and graduates high school.

Rory’s graduation is a week before his. She tells him it won’t be too fancy, but Luke wrestles him into a suit and tie for the event, which makes him itch, though in the end he’s grateful because it means he doesn’t attract any attention in this crowd of rich people. It’s there that he finally meets Rory’s grandparents, though it’s just a handshake and a “Nice to meet you ma’am, sir.”

“You did admirably,” Rory says afterward, linking her arm in his.

“Yeah, well they didn’t ask me about where I was going to college or what I’m planning to do with my life, so it was pretty easy.”

“True,” Rory says. “All the same, a lot of people have made very bad impressions on my grandparents.”

“And I’m sure they remember all of them.”

Truth be told, he doesn’t really like them, but he keeps that to himself. He’s always had an aversion to wealth, and, he suspects, always will, but he’ll put up with Rory’s relatives. He’s uncomfortable at this school, the manicured hedges at the old stone building, but it’s Rory’s graduation so he’s there. He’s already the reason she didn’t get to go to prom and he doesn’t want to mess anything else up. That night, the two of them go out to the bridge and lie on the wooden boards, looking up at the sky. It’s clear and there are stars out and Jess wants this moment burned into his memory always, Rory’s head on his chest and his fingers in her hair, Orion high above them, the quiet movement of the water the only sound.

~

Jess’ own graduation is a week later. Rory won’t let him skip it, despite his incessant begging.

“You’ll regret it if you don’t go,” she tells him the night before, when the two of them are sitting on the steps to Rory’s house, putting off saying goodnight.

“Doubt it.”

“Okay, look at it this way then. They tried so hard to stop you from graduating, so taking your diploma is a way of saying ‘screw you,’ you know?”

“That’s more like it,” Jess says, pulling Rory close to kiss the top of her head. “Now you’re talking like you know me.”

Rory laughs and settles against his shoulder. “So,” she says.

“So.”

“You’re free after this. Free to go into the great beyond.”

“Yeah.” That doesn’t quite feel real to him. All his life, school has been a shackle, one he’s constantly trying to escape. The idea that it’ll be absolutely finished in less than 24 hours is hard to wrap his mind around.

The ceremony is in the gym, the students in tacky plastic robes. All the same, Rory treats it like a big moment, cheering from the stands when his name is called. It might have embarrassed him if it were someone else, but coming from Rory he can recognize it as pride, recognition of a victory hard-won. After the whole thing is over, he sheds his robe as quickly as possible and pulls her out back behind the school to kiss her. The fact that it’s all over is starting to hit him with a wave of euphoria.

The two of them go back to the diner for a special lunch with Luke and Lorelai, and through most of it Rory holds his hand under the table. Lorelai even lets him stay over at her house, so Jess and Rory stay up late watching bad movies, alternating between throwing popcorn at the screen and making out. Rory falls asleep on his chest and he has to wake her and wrestle her in her groggy state back to her bedroom.

~

A couple weeks later, Rory leaves for Europe with her mother, but she spends the whole day before her flight with Jess, mostly at the bridge. Rory reads to him and they talk and Jess aches with how much he’ll miss this place, because even if he’s not leaving right away, he knows this will be the last time for three months at least that he’s here with Rory, and really it isn’t the same without her.

“I’ll write you a million postcards,” she says.

“Only a million?”

“Fine, a billion. And you can write to me, too, because I made an itinerary. As long as you’re careful about the timing, you can send letters to all the hotels.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You have to keep me updated on your plans! You’re making big decisions this summer.”

Jess traces a vein on the back of her hand with his finger. “What if I don’t make any decisions. What if I just stay here and work at the diner.”

“Okay,” Rory says, “first of all, staying put is a decision, just a less dramatic one than going somewhere else. And second, that doesn’t sound like you.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Oh! I almost forgot, I have a present for you.” Rory extracts her hand from his to dig into her purse and pull out two cassette tapes. “Here you go.”

Jess takes them and looks at the labels, but all they say is _For Jess_ , and then _vol. 1_ and _vol. 2_. He looks up at her. “Mixtapes?”

She shakes her head. “Okay, I was gonna make you wait until you got home to listen to them to find out what they are but I’m gonna tell you instead. It’s me reading. Like I do out here. Poetry, short stories, bits and pieces from novels. Even some Bukowski because you’re tasteless.”

Jess doesn’t cry easily, finds it hard to cry, actually, but not he’s feeling a bit choked up. Because Rory knows -- knows that what he’ll miss most is their times on the bridge, the sound of his favorite stories in her voice, the way a word from her can settle him. He presses a kiss to her temple and the corner of her jaw and the side of her mouth as she laughs and laughs at him.

~

It’s a lonely three months. He has Luke, though mainly the two of them sulk behind the counter, each missing their respective Gilmore. He listens to the tapes until he has them practically memorized, buys a little tape recorder at the hardware store so he’ll be able to listen to them while walking around town, while sitting at the lake with his feet in the water, while falling asleep. There’s one spot in the middle of Merwin poem when she coughs a little that he especially likes, but his favorite part of it is the only part that isn’t her reading. It’s before she reads Wendell Berry’s “[Mad Farmer Manifesto](http://www.context.org/iclib/ic30/berry/).”

She says, _You know, Jess, this poem has always made me think of you. Not all of it, because you’re such a city boy, but the end of it, I think I started associating it with you, two? Three weeks after we met? And as I got to know you it just started to feel more and more true, more and more about you, and the way you are. It’s the lines, “Be like the fox/who makes more tracks than necessary/some in the wrong direction./Practice resurrection.” That last one, particularly. “Practice resurrection.” Listen, I don’t know, maybe this is sappy of me, or -- I don’t know, I don’t care. I’m gonna say it anyway. You always make me think of resurrection. Like a phoenix, you know? Like a boxer who won’t go down. But I’m rambling now, okay, I’m gonna read the poem. I’m just saying, Wendell Berry is telling you, never change._

And then a little laugh, and then she reads it. And to Jess, it’s the most true _I love you_ he’s ever heard. He doesn’t go a day of that summer without listening to it.

She also sends, Jess thinks, as close to a billion postcards as she can afford postage for. They come almost daily, from cities across Europe, with cliche pictures of famous monuments and paintings from the museums she’s visiting. Some have real notes on the back, orderly accounts in Rory’s neat handwriting of what they’ve been doing. Some just have doodles, some are written in what Jess imagines to be remarkably ungrammatical French. He tacks them all up on the wall above his bed and tells Luke to shut up every time he makes fun of the ever growing collage. When Luke gets an occasional postcard from Lorelai, Jess just smirks at him.

~

Rory and Lorelai get back on a Sunday night in August and on Monday morning the two of them are sitting on the step out front when Luke and Jess come down to open. Rory launches herself into Jess’ arms when he unlocks the door and the two of them stumble back into a table.

“I missed you!” She says, squeezing him hard.

He kisses her shoulder and says, “Missed you too. What are you doing up so early?”

“It’s the jetlag,” Lorelai says. “Our bodies think it’s six hours later than it is. Our bodies needed coffee six hours ago.”

Luke grumbles something indecipherable and starts the coffee while Rory disentangles herself from Jess. “I brought you a present,” she says, pulling out a chair and sitting.

Jess pushes himself up onto the table, trusting that Luke will be too busy with Lorelai to notice. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, and I really hope you like it, I’ve been kind of nervous about it because I’m worried that it’s not really a _you_ present. I mean, it’s a book, so that’s obviously very you, but I know you like paperbacks because they’re practical and you don’t have to feel bad breaking the spine and you can shove it in your back pocket, and now I’m rambling. Anyway, it’s not a very practical book, but I hope you like it anyway. You’re giving me a look. What’s that look?”

“It’s an I missed you and your stupid rambling look. Now give me my present.”

“Alright, alright.” She unzips her backpack and pulls out a leather bound book, which she hands to him. “It’s Rilke,” she explains. “In German. Which I know you can’t read. Hence it being really impractical. But I thought you would like to have it anyway.”

He doesn’t look at her right away, just stares at the cover of the book. It fits satisfyingly in his hands, and has a weight and heft to it that his disintegrating paperbacks lack. He opens it carefully and presses his face to the page, feeling the fiber of it on his cheek and taking a deep breath.

“I take it you like it, then,” Rory says, and he closes the book, embarrassed. But Rory is smiling at him and god, he’s missed that smile.

“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

~

That afternoon, Jess sits on Rory’s bed as she moves frantically around her room, tossing things into bags and then digging things out of bags to throw them into other bags. He’s used to putting everything he owns into his canvas carryall in about five minutes, but Rory is the kind of person who painstakingly organizes everything, including her suitcases, so it’s fairly disorienting to see her packing in this frenzied way.

“So what happened to your week off?” He asks.

“It’s gone, it’s vanished, it never was.”

“Your orientation got moved?” Her phone call ten minutes earlier had conveyed very little information other than that she was heading out to Yale in two days time and that she wanted him to come over right now. He’d sprinted over from Luke’s, trying to ignore the outsized -- he didn’t want to call it grief, but couldn’t find a better word -- he’d felt on finding out he wouldn’t get that week with her that they’d expected to have been her return from Europe and her departure from college, and now he’s witnessing the tornado that is Rory overwhelmed by anxiety.

“No,” she says, trying to cram one last book into an already overstuffed backpack. “I wrote the date down wrong, like an absolute idiot. God, I can’t believe I made such a stupid mistake."

“Hey,” Jess says, getting up from the couch and grabbing her hand to prevent her doing any more damage to the spine of _Mansfield Park_. “It happens, it’s fine. Chill for a second, okay?”

“I have to be ready to go to college in two days, I don’t have time to chill.”

“I can help you pack, your mom can help you pack, and you will definitely regret it if you destroy every book you own in the process of trying to get them to Yale.”

She lets go of the book then, and presses her hands to her face. “I know, I just. It’s not even all the stuff I need to do, it’s.”

“I know,” he says.

“It’s that I was gonna hang out with my mom and with you and have another week of getting burgers at Luke’s before I have to live on cafeteria food. I was gonna sleep in and be -- not a college student yet just for a few days.”

“I know.”

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s not.”

Rory sighs her sigh of exasperation with herself. “I want to be a college student. I’ve been excited for college since I was three. I don’t know why I’m not excited.”

“Because you were gonna be a kid for one more week and now you aren’t.”

“Yeah,” she says, and she begins to lean against him. “Yeah.”

He puts his arm around her and is content with the fact that she has stopped her frantic movement and stilled for a moment, there with him. It’s strange, he thinks, how she can be so smart and then so silly about her own heart. How she went on dating Dean for months and months after she knew she didn’t love him, how she expects herself to go off to college without a single tear shed for the life she’s leaving behind. He can’t say it to her, not like that, not without hurting her. Instead, he says, “Your mom and this town and this world think they know everything there is to know about Rory Gilmore, and I’m not saying they don’t know you, but sometimes they don’t see everything. Sometimes they don’t see that you’re scared because they’re so proud of how strong you can be. You’re allowed to not feel ready. You’re allowed to be terrified when you think you should be excited. At least when you’re with me, you can feel whatever you’re feeling and you don’t have to apologize for it.”

She makes a sound very much like a sniff. “That’s a lot of words for you,” she says, in a tone that is obviously meant to be lighthearted but fails spectacularly to be so given how close she sounds to tears.

“Yeah, well, it was an important thing to say.” He’s noticed, though, that it’s gotten easier -- stringing together sentences when he has something he needs to tell her, getting the words to come out in the right order meaning the right thing. Practice makes perfect, he thinks.

She starts to cry, not great sobs but crying all the same, face pressed to his shoulder as he presses a kiss against her hair and rubs her back. It’s incredible to him that he’s become the kind of person who can hold someone while they cry instead of being the one distressed, raging, spilling emotion everywhere that it doesn’t belong while someone else stands back, trying to avoid becoming part of the collateral damage. He gives thanks for Rory.

~

Jess gets roped into helping shop for what he privately thinks is a completely outrageous number of apparently entire necessary items for Rory’s college life with the promise that once they’re done with their errands, he and Rory can spend the evening together.

“Friday night is just me and my mom, we’re watching _The Godfather_ and it’s an absolutely sacred plan,” she tells him, “but tonight is all you.”

And so he gets her sheets and her matching towel set and her shower caddy and a dozen other things and piles them into the trunk of Lorelai’s car and then, finally, once it’s all boxed up and ready, he and Rory head out together to the bridge. It’s a late August evening, still warm, the sky a deepening blue. Out by the lake, there are locusts buzzing. It’s another one of those moments that Jess wants to remember in perfect, rich detail for the rest of his life, as though if he never forgot the feel of Rory’s hand in his and the light breeze coming across the water, he’d never give in to rage or misery again.

They lie together on their backs and watch the stars begin to come out. It feels like such an expansive, important moment and Jess wants to say just the right thing, the thing that means everything he feels, that she’ll remember and treasure and understand. He wants to say _you changed my life_ and _I’ve never been safe with anyone the way I am with you_ and _I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life but if you asked me to marry you right now I’d do it._ He squeezes her hand, hard.

“We’re gonna be okay, you and me,” she says, as though he really had spoken. “We’ve made it through so much, we’ll make it through my going away to college. We’ll be okay no matter what you decide to do. Promise.”

He opens his mouth, licks his lips, stares up at the sky. “I had a feeling when I met you,” he says. “Not like love at first sight but -- me and my mom bounced between apartments and I’ve never been that attached to any place I’ve lived, not even Luke’s. Not even New York City, really. But the first time I saw you -- I think that’s what other people feel when they see their front door after being away for months.”

Now she squeezes his hand. “You know, I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

He laughs, though he knows she means it. In the growing darkness he looks over at her, the silhouette of her face, features indistinct in that dusk light that obscures all detail. Still, he would know that profile, the curve of her forehead, the elegant line of her nose, the slight point of her chin. He feels ludicrous. He feels like he understands all the poetry he had adored without being able to make sense of the feeling behind it. He wants, he thinks, to be a crazy teenager in love with Rory for the rest of time. He wants to have known her, to have been with her so long that he can reach out his hand without looking and take hers. He knows that he’s obsessive, he knows that about himself. He knows that he adores, with a searing absoluteness, a single song or book or turn of phrase for weeks at a time. He knows, also, that Rory is different from that. Rory isn’t an obsession of his, she’s just a person he’s meant to be with for the rest of his life, in whatever way he can be. He runs the tips of his fingers over the wood of the bridge, feeling its irregular texture.

“Rory,” he begins, as he usually begins sentences that feel like he’s throwing himself off a cliff. “It’s only since I met you that I’ve started imagining myself growing old.”

“What do you mean?”

He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want her to be dense about this, not now, not in this perfect moment. But then, will it make it any less perfect, his having to explain this to her? Does he need her to understand every furled up part of him? Or is it enough that she’ll listen as he fumbles about for the words?

“I couldn’t imagine making it to my own future. I couldn’t imagine making it past 21.”

“Oh,” she says. She rolls over onto her side, moving toward him so that she can rest her head on his chest. As always, she’s careful to position herself so as not to cause him any pain. “There,” she says. “Your heartbeat.”

He curls a hand around her shoulder and holds her tight and squeezes his eyes shut and thinks of his blood moving through his body, and the thought doesn’t revolt him.

As he walks her home, late enough that he knows there’d be trouble if it were any night other than this one, he keeps silent as she talks about her plans for the next day and the day after -- a day which Jess is still having a little trouble thinking about -- and finds he’s hearing mostly just the sound of her voice, sweet and bright in the cooling air. He’s tired and he’s felt so many things today and that makes it hard not to zone out a little, even when it’s Rory talking.

They get to Rory’s house and stand there together in the yard for a minute.

“There’s my front door,” she says, giving him one of those quick, sharp smiles that belong to their inside jokes.

“Yeah,” he says, looking at her.

She goes up on tiptoe to kiss him then pulls away and says, “Goodnight, Jess."

“Goodnight, Rory.”

~

Lorelai and Rory leave early on Saturday, but not without stopping at Luke’s for their morning coffee and to say goodbye. Neither Luke nor Lorelai approve of Rory and Jess being alone together in the apartment above the diner, but on this morning they turn a blind eye as the two go upstairs hand in hand.

“So,” Jess says, closing the door quietly behind them. “How are you feeling.”

“Good,” Rory says, slipping her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Really good.” And her smile is genuine -- she isn’t lying. “It’s really happening, I’m really going to Yale.”

“You are.”

Jess isn’t sure he could answer the question if she turned it back on him, but she doesn’t. What he’s feeling is a strange mix of fear and pride and loss, but he can’t put any of it into words so instead he steps towards her and taking her face in both his hands, kisses her. “I hope it’s even better than your dreams.”

“Don’t get sappy,” she says.

“This feels like a sap-worthy occasion.”

“You can’t get sappy because if you get sappy I’ll get sappy and if I get sappy then I’ll start crying and I am definitely, definitely not crying today.”

“Okay,” he says. “I won’t be sappy.”

“This isn’t even sort of goodbye,” she says, giving him an almost stern look.

“Never said it was.”

“You’re coming to see me two weekends from now."

“I’ve already got my bus ticket.”

“And you’ll call.”

“Every day,” he promises.

“And in those two weeks between the phone calls you won’t forget that I love you lots and lots and if you ever run off to New York without a word I will come hunt you down?”

He grins. “I won’t forget.”

“Okay,” she says. “We should probably go back down before they remember they don’t trust us.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“You’re not moving,” she says in a way that clearly indicates that she knows he isn’t moving because he wants to kiss her just one more time.

“Yeah,” he says again, and she rolls her eyes and pulls him toward her to kiss him lightly on the lips before they go back down the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @umusings on tumblr for proofing! Thanks to anyone still reading this for waiting a year+ for me to update!


End file.
